Oracle Night

by Paul Auster

  On the third day, Nick finally ventures outside. He walks down the street, enters a men’s clothing store, and spends the next hour browsing among the racks, shelves, and bins. Little by little, he pieces together a new wardrobe for himself, loading up on everything from pants and shirts to underwear and socks. When he hands the clerk his American Express card to pay the bill, however, the machine rejects the card. The account has been canceled, the clerk informs him. Nick is thrown by this unexpected development, but he pretends to take it in his stride. It doesn’t matter, he says. I’ll pay with my Visa card. But when the clerk swipes that one through the machine, it proves to be invalid as well. It’s an embarrassing moment for Nick. He wants to make a joke about it, but no funny remarks spring to mind. He apologizes to the clerk for having inconvenienced him and then turns around and leaves the store.

  The snafu is easily explained. Bowen has already figured it out before he returns to the hotel, and once he understands why Eva canceled the cards, he grudgingly admits that he would have done the same thing in her place. A husband goes out to mail a letter and doesn’t come back. What is the wife to think? Desertion is a possibility, of course, but that thought wouldn’t come until later. The first response would be alarm, and then the wife would run through a catalogue of potential accidents and dangers. Hit by a truck, knifed in the back, robbed at gunpoint and then knocked on the head. And if her husband was the victim of a robbery, then the thief would have taken his wallet and walked off with his credit cards. With no evidence to support one hypothesis or another (no reports of a crime, no dead bodies found in the street), canceling the credit cards would have been a minimum precaution.

  Nick has only sixty-eight dollars in cash. He has no checks with him, and when he stops at an ATM on his way back to the Hyatt Regency, he learns that his Citibank card has been canceled as well. His situation has suddenly become quite desperate. All avenues to money have been blocked, and when the hotel finds out that the American Express card he registered with on Monday night is no longer valid, he’ll be in the ugliest of predicaments, perhaps even forced to defend himself against criminal charges. He thinks about calling Eva and going home, but he can’t bring himself to do it. He hasn’t come all this way just to turn around and run back at the first sign of trouble, and the fact is that he doesn’t want to go home; he doesn’t want to go back. Instead, he takes the elevator to the tenth floor of the hotel, enters his suite, and dials Rosa Leightman’s number in New York. He does it on pure impulse, without having the first idea of what he wants to say to her. Fortunately, Rosa is out, and so Nick leaves a message on her answering machine – a rambling monologue that makes little or no sense, not even to him.

  I’m in Kansas City, he says. I don’t know why I’m here, but I’m here now, maybe for a long time, and I need to talk to you. It would be best if we could talk in person, but it’s probably too much to ask you to fly out here on such short notice. Even if you can’t come, please give me a call. I’m staying at the Hyatt Regency, room Ten-forty-six. I’ve been through your grandmother’s book several times now, and I think it’s the best thing she ever wrote. Thank you for giving it to me. And thank you for coming to my office on Monday. Don’t be upset when I say this, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you. You pounded me like a hammer, and when you stood up and left the room, my brain was in little pieces. Is it possible to fall in love with someone in ten minutes? I don’t know anything about you. I don’t even know if you’re married or live with someone, if you’re free or not. But it would be so nice if I could talk to you, so nice if I could see you again. It’s beautiful out here, by the way. All strange and flat. I’m standing at the window, looking out at the city. Hundreds of buildings, hundreds of roads, but everything is silent. The glass blocks out the sound. Life is on the other side of the window, but in here everything looks dead, unreal. The problem is that I can’t stay at the hotel much longer. I know a man who lives at the other end of town. He’s the only person I’ve met so far, and I’m going out to look for him in a few minutes. His name is Ed Victory. I have his card in my pocket and I’ll give you his number, just in case I’ve checked out before you call. Maybe he’ll know where I am. 816-765-4321. I’ll say it again: 816-765-4321. How odd. I just noticed that the numbers go down in order, one digit at a time. I’ve never seen a telephone number that did that before. Do you think it means something? Probably not. Unless it does, of course. I’ll let you know when I find out. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll call again in a couple of days. Adios.

  A week goes by before she listens to the message. If Nick had called twenty minutes earlier, she would have answered the telephone, but Rosa has just left her apartment, and therefore she knows nothing about his call. At the moment Nick records his words on her machine, she is sitting in a yellow cab three blocks from the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, on her way to Newark Airport, where an afternoon flight will be taking her to Chicago. It’s Wednesday. Her sister is getting married on Saturday, and because the ceremony will be held at her parents’ house, and because Rosa is the maid of honor, she’s going out early to help with the preparations. She hasn’t seen her parents in some time, so she’ll take advantage of the visit to spend a few extra days with them following the wedding. Her plan is to return to New York on Tuesday morning. A man has just declared his love to her on a telephone answering machine, and a full week will go by before she knows anything about it.

  In another part of New York on that same Wednesday afternoon, Nick’s wife, Eva, has also turned her thoughts toward Rosa Leightman. Nick has been missing for roughly forty hours. With no word from the police concerning accidents or crimes that involve a man who matches her husband’s description, with no ransom notes or telephone calls from would-be kidnappers, she begins to consider the possibility that Nick has absconded, that he walked out on her under his own steam. Until this moment, she has never suspected him of having an affair, but when she thinks back to what he said about Rosa in the restaurant on Monday night, and when she remembers how taken he was with her – even going so far as to confess his attraction out loud – she starts to wonder if he isn’t off on some adulterous escapade, shacked up in the arms of the thin girl with the spiky blond hair.

  She looks up Rosa’s number in the phone book and calls her apartment. There’s no answer, of course, since Rosa is already on the plane. Eva leaves a short message and hangs up. When Rosa fails to return the call, Eva dials again that night and leaves another message. This pattern is repeated for several days – a call in the morning and a call at night – and the longer Rosa’s silence continues, the more enraged Eva becomes. Finally, she goes to Rosa’s building in Chelsea, climbs three flights of stairs, and knocks on her apartment door. Nothing happens. She knocks again, pounding with her fist and rattling the door on its hinges, and still no one answers. Eva takes this as definitive proof that Rosa is with Nick – an irrational assumption, but by now Eva is beyond the pull of logic, frantically stitching together a story to explain her husband’s absence that draws on her darkest anxieties, her worst fears about her marriage and herself. She scribbles a note on a scrap of paper and slips it under Rosa’s door. I need to talk to you about Nick, it says. Call me at once. Eva Bowen.

  By now, Nick is long gone from the hotel. He has found Ed Victory, who lives in a tiny room on the top floor of a boardinghouse in one of the worst parts of town, a fringe neighborhood of crumbling, abandoned warehouses and burned-out buildings. The few people wandering the streets are black, but this is a zone of horror and devastation, and it bears little resemblance to the enclaves of black poverty that Nick has seen in other American cities. He has not entered an urban ghetto so much as a sliver of hell, a no-man’s-land strewn with empty wine bottles, spent needles, and the hulks of stripped-down, rusted cars. The boardinghouse is the one intact structure on the block, no doubt the last remnant of what the neighborhood used to be, eighty or a hundred years ago. On any other street, it would have passed for a condemne
d building, but in this context it looks almost inviting: a three-story house with flaking yellow paint, sagging steps and roof, and plywood planks hammered across every one of the nine front windows.

  Nick raps on the door, but no one answers. He raps again, and a few moments later an old woman in a green terry-cloth robe and a cheap auburn wig is standing before him – disconcerted, mistrustful, asking what he wants. Ed, Bowen replies, Ed Victory. I talked to him on the phone about an hour ago. He’s expecting me. For the longest time, the woman says nothing. She looks Nick up and down, dead eyes studying him as though he were some form of unclassifiable being, glancing down at the leather briefcase in his hand and then back up at his face, trying to figure out what a white man is doing in her house. Nick reaches into his pocket and produces Ed’s business card, hoping to convince her he’s there on a legitimate errand, but the woman is half blind, and as she leans forward to look at the card, Nick understands that she can’t make out the words. He ain’t in no trouble, is he? she asks. No trouble, Nick answers. Not that I know of, anyway. And you ain’t no cop? the woman says. I’m here to get some advice, Nick tells her, and Ed is the only person who can give it to me. Another long pause follows, and finally the woman points to the staircase. Three-G, she says, the door on the left. Be sure and knock loud when you get there. Ed’s usually asleep this time of the day, and he don’t hear so good.

  The woman knows what she’s talking about, for once Nick climbs the darkened staircase and locates Ed Victory’s door at the end of the hall, he has to knock ten or twelve times before the ex-cabdriver asks him to come in. Massive and round, with his suspenders hanging off his shoulders and the top of his pants unbuttoned, Nick’s sole acquaintance in Kansas City is sitting on his bed and pointing a gun straight at his visitor’s heart. It’s the first time anyone has pointed a gun at Bowen, but before he can become sufficiently alarmed and back out of the room, Victory lowers the weapon and puts it on the bedside table.

  It’s you, he says. The New York lightning man.

  Expecting trouble? Nick asks, belatedly feeling the terror of a potential bullet in the chest, even though the danger has passed.

  These are troubled times, Ed says, and this is a troubled place. A man can never be too careful. Especially a sixty-seven-year-old man who’s none too swift afoot.

  No one can outrun a bullet, Nick replies.

  Ed grunts by way of response, then asks Bowen to take a seat, unexpectedly referring to a passage from Walden as he gestures toward the one chair in the room. Thoreau said he had three chairs in his house, Ed remarks. One for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society. I’ve only got the one for solitude. Throw in the bed, and maybe there’s two for friendship. But there’s no society in here. I had my fill of that piloting my hack.

  Bowen eases himself onto the straight-backed wooden chair and glances around the small, tidy room. It makes him think of a monk’s cell or a hermit’s refuge: a drab, spartan place with no more than the barest essentials for living. A single bed, a single chest of drawers, a hot plate, a bar-sized refrigerator, a desk, and a bookcase with several dozen books in it, among them eight or ten dictionaries and a well-worn set of Collier’s Encyclopedia in twenty volumes. The room represents a world of restraint, inwardness, and discipline, and as Bowen turns his attention back to Victory, who is calmly watching him from the bed, he takes in one final detail, which previously escaped his notice. There are no pictures hanging on the walls, no photographs or personal artifacts on display. The only adornment is a calendar tacked to the wall just above the bureau – from 1945, open to the month of April.

  I’m in a fix, Bowen says, and I thought you might be able to help me.

  It all depends, Ed replies, reaching for a pack of unfiltered Pall Malls on the bedside table. He lights a cigarette with a wooden match, takes a prolonged drag, and immediately begins to cough. Years of clogged phlegm clatters inside his shrunken bronchi, and for twenty seconds the room fills with convulsive bursts of sound. When the fit subsides, Ed grins at Bowen and says: Whenever people ask me why I smoke, I tell them it’s because I like to cough.

  I didn’t mean to bother you, Nick says. Maybe this isn’t a good time.

  I’m not bothered. A man gives me a twenty-dollar tip, and two days later he shows up and tells me he’s got a problem. It makes me kind of curious.

  I need work. Any kind of work. I’m a good auto mechanic, and it occurred to me you might have an in at the cab company you used to work for.

  A man from New York with a leather briefcase and a quality suit tells me he wants to be a mechanic. He overtips a cabbie and then claims to be broke. And now you’re going to tell me you don’t want to answer any questions. Am I right or wrong?

  No questions. I’m the man who was struck by lightning, remember? I’m dead, and whoever I used to be makes no difference anymore. The only thing that counts is now. And right now I have to earn some money.

  The people who run that outfit are a pack of knaves and fools. Forget that idea, New York. If you’re really desperate, though, I might have something for you at the Bureau. You need a strong back and a good head for numbers. If you meet those qualifications, I’ll hire you. At a decent wage. I might look like a pauper, but I’ve got bags of money, more money than I know what to do with.

  The Bureau of Historical Preservation. Your business.

  Not a business. It’s more in the nature of a museum, a private archive.

  My back is strong, and I know how to add and subtract. What kind of work are you talking about?

  I’m reorganizing my system. There’s time, and there’s space. Those are the only two possibilities. The current setup is geographic, spatial. Now I want to switch things around and make them chronological. It’s a better way, and I’m sorry I didn’t think of it sooner. There’s some heavy lifting involved, and my body isn’t up to doing it alone. I need a helper.

  And if I said I’m willing to be that helper, when would I start?

  Right now if you like. Just give me a chance to button up my trousers, and I’ll walk you over there. Then you can decide if you’re interested or not.

  I broke off then for a bite to eat (some crackers and a tin of sardines) and washed down the snack with a couple of glasses of water. It was pushing five, and although Grace had said she would be back by six or six-thirty, I wanted to squeeze in a little more time with the blue notebook before she returned, to keep on going until the last possible minute. On the way back to my study at the end of the hall, I slipped into the bathroom to have a quick pee and splash some water on my face – feeling invigorated, ready to plunge on with the story. Just as I left the bathroom, however, the front door of the apartment opened, and in stepped Grace, looking wan and exhausted. Her cousin Lily was supposed to have accompanied her to Brooklyn (to have dinner with us and spend the night on the foldout sofa in the living room, then leave early in the morning for New Haven, where she was a second-year architecture student at Yale), but Grace was alone, and before I could ask her what was wrong, she gave me a weak smile, rushed down the hall in my direction, made an abrupt left, and entered the bathroom. The moment she got there, she fell to her knees and vomited into the toilet.

  After the deluge ended, I helped her to her feet and guided her into the bedroom. She looked terribly pale, and with my right arm around her shoulder and my left arm around her waist, I could feel her whole body trembling – as if small currents of electricity were passing through it. Maybe it was the Chinese food from last night, she said, but I told her I didn’t think so, since I’d eaten the same dishes she had and my stomach was fine. You’re probably coming down with something, I said. Yes, Grace answered, you’re probably right, it must be one of those bugs – using that odd little word we all fall back on to describe the invisible contagions that float through the city and worm their way into people’s bloodstreams and inner organs. But I’m never sick, Grace added, even as she passively let me take off her clothes and put her into bed. I touched
her forehead, which felt neither hot nor cold, and then I fished the thermometer out of the bedside table drawer and stuck it in her mouth. Her temperature turned out to be normal. That’s encouraging, I said. If you get a good night’s sleep, you’ll probably feel better in the morning. To which Grace replied: I have to be better. There’s an important meeting at work tomorrow, and I can’t miss it.

  I made her a cup of weak tea and a slice of dry toast, and for the next hour or so I sat beside her on the bed, talking to her about her cousin Lily, who’d put her into a cab after the first wave of queasiness had sent her running to the women’s room at the Met. After a few sips of the tea, Grace declared that the nausea was lifting – only to be overwhelmed again fifteen minutes later, which sent her on another dash to the toilet across the hall. After that second onslaught, she began to settle down, but another thirty or forty minutes went by before she was relaxed enough to fall asleep. In the meantime, we talked a little, then said nothing for a while, then talked again, and all through those minutes before she finally dropped off, I stroked her head with my open palm. It felt good to be playing nurse, I told her, even if for just a few hours. It had been the other way around for so long, I’d forgotten there could be another sick person in the house besides myself.